Why the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Can't Cooperate

Unsurprisingly, there have been comparisons between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Both are angry, outside the establishment (although the Tea Party is moving in fast), dissatisfied with the status quo and basically hostile to the whole idea of leadership and conventional politics and mad as hell about the TARP. Some have argued that their complaints are so similear there should be plenty of room for cooperation. There is even a Venn diagram showing their areas of overlap.
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Here's why I don't think it can work. Both groups may have similar analysis of what is wrong witho our country, but their prescriptions about what to do about it are diamatrically opposed. That is a very poor basis for alliance.

Let me make a qualification here. I am not a member of OWS and therefore not qualified to speak for them. Nor do the comments of right-wing Republicans or Fox News necessarily reflect the views of the Tea Party. But so far as I can tell, both sides are angry about the bank bailouts. But since it is too late to stop them now, the question is what to do for the future. To OWS, the answer is to punish the banks, or at least extract a price for the bailout and impose tighter regulations. To the Tea Party, it is bad enough that we interfered with the free market by bailing out the banks, to ask anything in return or to tighten regulations would simply compound the error.

Conservatives complain, with justification, that OWS protestors seem to reduce all our problems to rich people not paying enough taxes. But then again, the Tea Party seems to reduce all our problems to government spending too much. The Tea Party brought calls to balance to budget front and center as the most important political issue. They also made clear that balancing the budget would consist entirely of cutting services to low and middle income Americans and possibly adopting a more regressive tax system. Asking any sacrifice from upper incomes was out of the question. Is it any wonder such views have generated pushback?

Tea Parties are angry at government. OWS is angry at corporations. I'm pretty sure OWS is angry at government, too. But for the Tea Parties, anger at corporations is, by definition illegitimate. Here is a fascinating article on Eric Cantor explaining why anger at government is legitimate, but any suggestion of criticism of the private sector is completely out of bounds.

This commentator sums up the problem well. "[W]hen it came down to it, what did Wall Street and corporate America ever have to fear from the Tea Party? Lower corporate taxes and regulatory rollback? Seriously?" And that has always been the Tea Party's potential problem. When people are angry over a bank bailout that hasn't benefitted them any, calls for lower corporate taxes and regulatory rollback has never been the most intuitively satisfying response. For forty years now, the Right has assumed that it has a monopoly on populism. That monopoly is now being challenged.